


Eyes Burning Bright

by inlovewithnight



Category: X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: AU, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-21
Updated: 2009-11-21
Packaged: 2017-10-03 12:46:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>X-3 AU</p>
    </blockquote>





	Eyes Burning Bright

**Author's Note:**

> X-3 AU

_No more mutants._ ~ Wanda Maximoff

_I want to see your eyes. Take these off...Trust me. I can control it now. Open them. You can't hurt me._~ Jean Grey

(now)

 

The wind comes off Alkali Lake cold and fast, and slides over his skin like it wants to peel it from his bones. It hurts to breathe.

Maybe that's not the wind.

Maybe it's the fact that Jean is standing in front of him, pale and wild-eyed but _there_, alive, impossibly _alive_.

Maybe it's the fact that he can see her as she is, instead of washed in red. His glasses are cast aside, lying in the dirt like a forgotten toy. That can't be right. None of this can.

This moment literally _cannot be_.

"I can fix it," Jean says softly, bringing her hand up to hover in front of his face. "I can make it better."

"Jean..." God, it hurts. Not just drawing air into his lungs, not just his skin under the knife-edge wind, but the inside of his head, the space behind his eyes, and...and his heart. His heart is pounding in his chest like it's about to burst.

"No more." That is not Jean's voice; it's too low, too dark, just above a growl. "No more."

Dimly, far away, he hears the lenses of the glasses break. He closes his eyes.

And when he opens them again, the world is still there.

 

(then)

 

The Professor smiles and pours a cup of tea, placing it in front of Scott. "Thank you for joining me, Mr. Summers."

Scott sits perfectly still, hands curled in his lap. The glasses obstruct his peripheral vision entirely and distort the rest; he's grown wary of his own body, paranoid of movement. Half the time, if he moves, he breaks something, and most of the breakable somethings around here are pretty expensive. The Professor always says it doesn't matter, but Scott knows it does.

"Go ahead," the Professor prompts gently. "It's very good."

Scott reaches for the cup slowly, sliding his fingers along the rim as lightly as he can to be sure he has the sense of its shape in space before he takes the handle and raises the cup to his mouth. The tea is almost painfully hot, and he flinches back, blinking hard. Then the taste hits him and his nose wrinkles. It's _not_ good. It's bitter.

The Professor laughs softly. "Try adding milk, and sugar. I apologize. I've been drinking this for a very long time."

Scott does as he's told, glancing around the office as covertly as he can. The Professor's office is like a den, cozy and softly lit. It's peaceful. Scott likes coming up here. It's much better than Mr. Lensherr's office, damp and ominous like a cave, with all those weirdly-shaped and twisted pieces of metal lying around. Lately Mr. Lensherr's been giving Scott's lessons in the library instead; it's hard to say if he got tired of Scott knocking things over all the time, or if he realized how uncomfortable Scott was in that room. Most likely the latter.

Scott is thirteen, and he hardly remembers a time when his thoughts were entirely, assuredly, his alone.

"I'd like to talk to you about Jean."

Scott's fingers twitch on the handle of the cup. "She's really nice."

"You two have spent time together?"

"Just meals, and watching TV a little bit." He takes another, careful sip. The tea is still gross, but at least it's bearable now. "She likes it here."

"I'm glad to hear it." The professor smiles slightly, then tilts his head to the side. "Scott, I have a bit of an unusual assignment for you."

Scott nods and waits. There's not much point in asking stupid questions that you already know the answers to when you're talking to a telepath.

"I'd like you to be responsible for Jean."

Scott usually tries to picture his thoughts as a smooth pond, or a layer of stone. If the surface is flat and uninteresting, most likely no one will care to go digging. But this turns everything into waves. "Responsible?"

"Make sure she's doing well. Take care of her, for lack of a better term."

"You want me to make sure she's happy?"

"Happy?" The professor blinks, as if Scott has found an angle he really never thought of before. It can't be true, but Scott tucks away the moment as something like a victory. "That isn't precisely what I had in mind, no."

"I guess I don't understand, then."

The professor pours himself some more tea. "I want you to keep her safe."

 

(now)

 

This is Jean but not Jean, half-Jean, Jean at some moments and not at others. Sometimes she clings to him so hard she leaves bruises. Sometimes she can't stand to be touched. He watches her, tracking every motion, the flushes under her skin, with these new eyes she gave him.

_"What did you do?" he asked her, when he put his hand up in front of his face and pulled it away still intact. "What...how..."_

_"I don't know. I don't know how I...but I fixed it." She grabbed his hand. "I fixed you. We have to go."_

Half the time she wants to go back to the mansion. "Charles Xavier," she says, and it's that growl of a voice. "I want to see the Professor."

Half the time she's frantic, half-hysterical, insisting they need to go as far away from the school as possible. Farther away than they already are. They need to put oceans between them, if possible. She won't say what she thinks is going to happen, only that they need to _go_.

He doesn't know what's going on, and he doesn't know how to help her. He has a hunch that as the leader of the X-Men, that makes him a failure. But he's gotten used to that feeling.

What he _does_ know is her voice, when she says they need to go. He recognizes that as the Jean he loves, the Jean he knows, the Jean he trusts with his life and his heart and his every breath.

So he steals them a car.

 

(then)

 

"I like her," he says. It sounds defensive, out loud. It sounds stupid. "I don't know, I just _like_ her."

"Mm." Erik nods toward Scott's assignment, shakes his head, and the pen hovering lazily over the table strikes another answer out. "Convenient, that."

"What?" Scott scowls at him, and then at the paper, because he really thought he had that one right. "What are you talking about? And why is that wrong?"

"It's wrong because you made a very basic mistake, on a level that I'm actually embarrassed to point out to you, so find it yourself." The pen rises up a little higher off the table and makes a threatening feint at Scott's face. "And when I said that your...affection for the girl was convenient, I meant exactly that. The common English definition of the word. We can look it up if you'd like."

"I mean _why_ is it convenient?" The problem looks perfectly right to him. Erik has to be making this up, because he's a jerk, and crazy, and old, and... "Because we live in the same house and we're both mutants?"

"In a way."

"I hate it when you're cryptic."

"Life is indeed a vale of tears. Dear God, boy, _look_. Stop glossing over the parts you assume must be right and _check_ them."

Scott grabs another sheet of paper and starts working the problem again, writing each number with exaggerated care. He only gets through the third step before he stops and tosses the pen down in silence.

"Hmm," Erik says flatly.

"Okay."

"The calculus is all rather useless if you fuck up the arithmetic."

"I get it."

"The rest of them are all correct."

"Okay." He picks the pen up again and finishes working the problem, just to be sure, then glances at Erik. "Why is it convenient?"

Erik settles back in his chair. "Well, Charles did ask you to look after her, didn't he? Much easier to be a good watchdog if you like the girl."

It takes a minute for Scott to filter past the obvious meanings--it's never the obvious meanings, not with Erik--and get to what's beneath. "You think he put it in my head?" Erik shrugs in eloquent silence, and Scott stares down at the table, his mind racing so fast it falls over itself. "No...no, I liked her _before_ he told me that, and besides, he wouldn't do that. You're wrong."

"Setting aside what Charles would and would not do...isn't that exactly what he would _want_ you to think?"

 

(now)

 

It doesn't take him very long to realize that they're being tracked. And that there's only one person or thing in the world that would a) care enough to track them and b) be so goddamn noisy about it.

He gets Jean tucked away in a hotel for the night, makes her promise to sleep and to _come find him_ if she can't, and then he goes to wait at a bar. That's where you find a Wolverine, at least in Arizona.

"What the hell," Logan says flatly, when he finally shows up, shakes the sand out of the cuffs of his jeans, and sits down at the stool next to Scott's, "are you doing in this godforsaken desert? And while we're on the subject of what the hell, what the hell happened to your eyes?"

"I couldn't explain if I had to. And we're trying to avoid _you_."

"Huh. Didn't work." The bartender hands Logan a beer that he didn't even order, just on pure professional instinct. Scott has to admit (silently, of course) that he's a little impressed.

"Go away, Logan. I mean it."

"Can't do it, champ. Xavier says you two need to come back to the school toot sweet." He downs half of the beer in a long swallow. "And before you even start giving me shit about since when do I listen to Xavier, it's since you took off like a maniac and your girlfriend came back from the dead."

"We can't." He doesn't know how to put it into words, the depth and breadth of how much they _cannot do that_, how very very bad for everyone it would be if they do. That's mainly because he doesn't understand it himself. But when Jean says it, over and over again, leaning against him and shaking in terror or weeping in her sleep, he knows beyond a trace of doubt that it's true.

"So what are you going to do, then? You can't keep running forever, and eventually I _am_ going to drag you back. You know it. I know it. The Professor knows it. Probably she knows it too."

"Logan," Scott says softly, pushing his drink away, "if you ever loved her and if you ever respected me, just let us go. Please."

Logan sets his beer bottle down and stares at him with the closest to horror that Scott's ever seen in his eyes. "Holy shit, Slim. How bad is it?"

 

(then)

 

"You're still wrong."

Erik looks up from his book, blinking in polite, weary patience. Scott knows that from where Erik's sitting, he's silhouetted in the bright doorway, and looking at him must border on painful. He doesn't move.

"About what, exactly?"

"I don't like Jean because the Professor made me. I like Jean because...because I do."

Erik sets his book aside and folds his hands in his lap. "Make your case."

"What?"

"How do you _know_?"

"I..." Scott's hands dig into his pockets, his shoulders hunching despite his resolve to stand tall and firm through all of this. "I just do."

"Ah."

"I _feel_ it," Scott spits in frustration, the feeling dissipating into confusion when Erik laughs.

"There we are, then. Good. Finally."

Scott kicks the doorframe. "I _hate_ it when you're cryptic."

"Before, you were trying to make your cased based on logic, or ethics," Erik says, with the airy patience he reserves for when Scott is being particularly stupid. "Now, you're going with your guts. With instinct. Much better." He picks up his book again. "Your instincts will take you farther than your brains ever will, Mr. Summers. Trust them. Always trust them. If you learn nothing else from me, and I begin to suspect you never will, learn _that_."

 

(now)

 

Jean wakes up screaming again, clawing at something he can't see, and he holds her until she settles into frustrated, breathless sobs.

"It's going to be okay," he tells her, over and over again. It will be. It has to be. He didn't lose her once and find her again on the other side of possibility just to let it happen again.

"I don't know what it is," she gasps, her fingers tightening against his arms, digging in hard. "I don't know how to control it. I can't make it stop."

"It'll be okay, Jean. We'll figure it out. Together."

_Together_ is all they have, right now. Logan had given them what cash he had and gone back to New York to tell the Professor that the walls had come tumbling down, and that unless he wanted to meet the monster he created, he should mind her own business until she had made herself whole. She would. Scott believed that with his whole heart. It never occured to him to believe anything else.

Of course, Logan believed in traveling light, including his wallet, so the privacy was more help than the money. But there were a million motorcycles that needed fixing in the world, and contrary to popular belief, Scott Summers was something like a resourceful guy.

"Don't leave me." A shudder runs through her, convulsive and scary to watch, because it's like she's _boneless_, helpless in the face of it. "God, don't leave me, Scott. I can't hold on without you."

"I'm not going anywhere." He kisses her hair, breathes her in, holds her tight. "We're in this together, baby. You and me. Till the wheels fall off."

She laughs a little against his shoulder, and turns her head to brush her lips against his neck. "That never made any sense, you know."

"I do know. You've always made a point of telling me."

They don't have a destination in mind; they just have to keep _going_, while she fumbles with the pieces of herself and he steadies her, tries to be her compass and her stable ground, takes care of the mundane and the practical. They have no money and no names and the world is on fire with the Cure and Magneto and a million other things that he probably should be paying attention to, should be trying to fix, but the only thing he cares about is right here.

"I can do it if you're here," she says. "I can do it if we're together. I can...hold on to _me_, I can keep it from tearing me apart."

"I'll help you." He can't hold her any tighter, so he kisses her again, trying to put all of his feelings into one gesture, more than it can possibly hold. "I won't let you get lost, Jean. Not ever."

This is his job. Always has been, always will be, as long as there's a Scott and a Jean. He will find her, and he will love her, and he will keep her safe. He knows, with his instincts and his logic, his gut and his mind, that this is where he belongs. This is what he does.

"I think," she says softly, muffled against his neck, "I think I could end the world."

There's nothing he can say to that, no possible response. He should probably be afraid of her, for saying it. He should be horrified. But this is Jean, and he can't be. Not by her, not ever.

"Or change it," she whispers, the other voice bleeding into hers now, making it darker. "I could change _everything_. Fix all of them, like I did for you."

"You never wanted that," he says, pulling back enough to meet her eyes. "You never thought mutants should want to be like everybody else."

"Maybe I changed my mind," she says, the note of threat cutting through that dark voice. He doesn't answer, just looks into her eyes, looking for the pieces of Jean turned on their edges and reflected around in all that power and pain.

"You won't love me so much," she tells him, "once you know what I can do."

He looks into her eyes and he sees worlds being born as much as worlds dying. She's still there, his girl, the woman he loves, the one who wants to heal and help. She has as much a fighting chance as the dark side, and for what it's worth, she's got him in her corner.

"Yes, I will," he says simply. "Forever."


End file.
